Alex Dragnich: Serbs and Croats: The Struggle in Yugoslavia

Dragnich’s Serbs and Croats is an interesting book for at least three reasons: it is written in so elementary manner that proverbial “complete idiots” (literally) are its target audience; then, given the quality of this historical narrative and Dragnich’s professional credentials (former professor at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee), one should ask some unpleasant questions about the academic tenure criteria of the US higher education system; and, after finishing the book, one is left with a kind of contemptuous pity for Serbian propaganda machine. Serbs and Croats is a litany of contradictory and easily refutable Serbian national myths: Croats are both inferior servile pro-German puppets and diabolical Serbocidal fanatics equipped by formidable survival skills, both as Fascist Ustashe and Communist Partisans; royal Yugoslavia was a bit flawed, but still a country close to embodiment of justice, freedom and democracy for all (especially for ungrateful non-Serbs); Croatian and Muslim Ustashe killed more than 500 thousand innocent Serbs (or million- Serbian national mythology has always been generous with figures); Communist Yugoslavia was dominated by Serb-hating Croatian dictator Tito (who, immediately after the WW2, ordered the killing of more Croats- both sexes and every age-than Serbian Chetniks, German Nazis and Italian Fascists combined had succeeded to murder); the republics boundaries in Tito’s federal Yugoslavia were drawn with intent to dismember Serbian ethnic corpus (never mind that Serbs were more dispersed than any other nation in Yugoslavia due to the historical fact that they have, in past three or four centuries, migrated into other peoples’s lands while remaining a minority there. As the last war has shown, their behavior exemplifies the case of colonial minorities elsewhere-from French in Algeria & British in Zimbabwe to Russians in Chechnya & Central Asian Republics. They either rule as a privileged caste or flee to their motherland when the system of exploitation, which they have been so avid a part thereof, breaks.)
Be as it may, I would recommend this book to those interested in tallying all the pathological fixations oppressing the Serbian collective psyche. Here you got them all, clearly cut and neatly packaged.